Kill the King

by Sandrone Dazieri

  “After which, you’ll be arrested and tried for treason and violation of state secrets.”

  Colomba ground her teeth. Oh, how she was aching to wrap her hands around his throat. “Is that what you wanted to tell me? Okay, not a word to a soul. Now have me taken back.”

  “Matters have gone too far to wrap this up on an informal basis. The prime minister is going to take part in the next select executive council meeting of CASA, scheduled to begin in a couple of hours. And you, Caselli, are going to be the guest of honor.”

  CASA was the Committee for Antiterrorism and Strategic Analysis. Those allowed to attend were almost exclusively the highest executives in the intelligence agencies and the police forces.

  “What would I be attending for? I’m a civilian now.”

  “You can tell the story of how you managed to find Torre and how, the whole time, you were operating on direct orders from my office. Santini will confirm your version of events.”

  “But I won’t. I’m sick of lying for you.”

  “Would you rather wind up behind bars in a military prison without being able to sit by your friend’s sickbed?”

  Colomba slumped back in her chair. “No,” she said in a low voice.

  “Then cease once and for all this pointless hostility. For that matter, it’s going to be an especially interesting meeting. The prime minister has been in office for six months and he’s finally been given the all-clear by the security agencies. He’s finally going to find out what actually happened in Venice.”

  5

  Lupo went back to his apartment and called the young woman’s family, awakening them with the worst news that a parent can receive. Speaking to them, he minimized the extent of her wounds, deciding to inform them that Martina had died instantly, and told them that they were doing everything possible to track down the perpetrators. After ending the call, he poured himself a glass of moonshine bourbon, distilled just like in the old days, during Prohibition, colorless and powerful. Lupo practically never drank, but right then he felt broken inside and out.

  He’d just thrown back his second gulp when Bruno knocked at the door. The elderly brigadier’s eyes were puffy and his hands were shaking. “I saw your light was still on.”

  “No problem.” Lupo gestured for him to come in. “Care for a glass?”

  Bruno nodded and sat down on the ottoman next to the large plastic cactus, barely wetting his lips after Lupo poured him a drink. “I’m going to apply for retirement,” he said all at once. “I’m at ninety percent if I factor in my obligatory service, that should be enough.”

  Lupo felt a stab of regret. Bruno had been serving under him for six years; they’d arrived at Portico together. They’d never become friends, but after all that time, there were few secrets between them. And Lupo had been well aware that Bruno was reaching his limit, though he’d pretended not to notice. “I know that if you’ve made up your mind, there’s no way I’ll be able to change it, but I wish I could. Think it over for a few more months.”

  Bruno’s expression didn’t alter. “I’ve been thinking about it for a year now; my mind is made up. And it’s not just because of Martina. It’s because of all the shit I’ve been forced to swallow. I’ve seen what’s happening right now far too many times before.”

  “Exactly what are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about people who cut and stitch the truth the way they see fit.”

  Lupo rolled his eyes: with the passing of the years, Bruno had become more and more of a conspiracy theorist. “The people who invented the vaccines to control us all?” he asked wearily.

  “I’m not crazy. I have eyes to see. And I do see things. Caselli won’t be indicted, how much are you willing to bet?”

  Lupo was caught off guard. “Vigevani is strangely reluctant. He made it clear to me that it has to do with the massacre in Venice …”

  “Because there’s something rotten about Venice,” Bruno said laconically. “I’ve talked with plenty of my colleagues who had some involvement in it. The intelligence agencies managed to make everything disappear. Evidence, eyewitness accounts … possibly corpses.”

  “They must be carrying out further confidential investigations.”

  “I know them, their confidential investigations. You weren’t around in the seventies, but I was. And back then, it was impossible not to get sucked into one thing or another by the intelligence agencies. But this is different.”

  “Different how?”

  “They’re hiding something big. Trust me. And Caselli is up to her neck in it.” Bruno wet his lips again. “She claims that she went to Venice for a two-day vacation with Torre and that she just happened to be passing by the Palasport della Misericordia during the attack. Then Bonaccorso stabbed her and kidnapped Torre, and nobody knows why. Right?”

  “That sounds right to me …”

  “In the days just previous, she had a shootout with an Islamic extremist, and then a cop on her squad murdered his wife and committed suicide. Guarneri was his name.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Lupo said, impressed. “But what does that have to do with anything?”

  “Well, just look at the coincidence, he killed himself the day before Venice. Pure chance? I doubt it.”

  “But that’s the most likely explanation.”

  “Would you have gone on vacation if your partner had just killed himself?”

  “No.”

  “And there’s another thing that very few know: Caselli knew Bonaccorso.”

  “What do you mean, she knew him?”

  “Apparently they met by chance. But an eyewitness reported that he’d seen them together on the train to Venice, before the massacre. Her, him, and Torre.”

  “That’s bullshit,” said Lupo, unconvinced. It seemed like a crazy story, but then Colomba’s had been even crazier.

  “I’m just giving you the facts. But if Caselli was working for the intelligence agencies, then we’ll never know the truth about what happened to Martina.”

  6

  The military had emptied a corner of the central warehouse by moving hundreds of bags of cement, stacking them in a semicircle around a long metal table and a paper pad easel, like an oversize legal pad standing on four legs. Besides Colomba, Santini, and Di Marco, seated around the table under fluorescent lamps were the chief of the national police and the general and commander in chief of the Carabinieri. Everyone was asked to leave their electronic devices in a plastic bin that was then carried away by a soldier to a safe distance. Di Marco had been able to get himself seated without using his hands, glaring daggers at the man sitting next to him who’d made a move to help him.

  He was a functionary, the man sitting next to Di Marco, whom Colomba had never seen before: in his early forties, bronzed, and with the lean body of a long-distance runner. She just had time to shake hands with him—“Pleasure to meet you, Walter D’Amore, AISI,” he said, using the acronym for the Italian Internal Information and Security Agency—before the prime minister made his entrance in a mustard-colored camel hair coat.

  It was strange to see him all alone: his security detail had been detained at the entrance to the warehouse, because they weren’t even authorized to see who was attending the meeting. Without his usual entourage, the prime minister looked around like a tourist out visiting monuments. He was forty-five years old—a young leader, by the standards of the Bel Paese—and to Colomba he always seemed to be making an effort to appear relaxed. She’d only ever seen him on TV, and not very often at that, because politics wasn’t an interest of hers. She thought that he looked like a pastry chef in a children’s book, with a round head and a dazzling smile.

  “Good evening, everyone, if I can use the phrase, considering what time it is,” he said, “and forgive the delay, but today I had one meeting after the other.” He raised his wrist and glanced at his watch. “It’s already one thirty in the morning, so I have no more than fifty minutes. I need to catch a plane to Paris for a free-trade
area conference.”

  “I doubt that fifty minutes is going to be enough time, Mr. Prime Minister,” Di Marco said in an icy voice.

  The other man threw both arms wide with a regretful smile. “I’d gladly do without it, given the emergency at hand, but it will be an opportunity to talk to my European counterparts about security, if nothing else.” He turned to Colomba and extended his hand. “I’m very pleased to meet you, Deputy Captain Caselli. People like you are a credit to our nation.”

  “Thank you,” said Colomba, embarrassed at the compliment. At least she’d had a chance to take a quick shower in the women’s barracks: a camo uniform without insignia had replaced the filthy ski suit.

  “I hope that there will be some other opportunity for us to meet and speak with more leisure. But I’m just too curious to know how you managed to find Signor Torre.”

  D’Amore laid both hands on the table; a small wooden Buddha dangled from his left wrist, Colomba noticed. “Before talking about that, we need to deal with a very sensitive subject, Mr. Prime Minister.” After a brief pause, he added: “The massacre in Venice.”

  The prime minister looked at him as if he’d just insulted him somehow. “Are there any new developments, aside from Signor Torre’s return home?”

  “I wouldn’t call them new developments exactly. More like a review of old ones,” said D’Amore, unruffled.

  The prime minister fell back on his pastry chef’s smile. “I already know everything that there is to know about Venice. I recently read the unredacted document issued by the commission on massacres. And I had a frank and wide-ranging discussion about it with the director of the CIA when he came to meet with me in Rome.”

  He must have had a good laugh, Colomba thought.

  “A very intelligent individual. I would imagine you must have met with him frequently, Colonel,” the prime minister said.

  “Mr. Prime Minister … I’m going to have to ask you to remain on topic,” said Di Marco, as annoyed as an elderly schoolteacher. “Very few people know anything about what we’re going to discuss now in this warehouse. Not a single word of this session is going to be transcribed, exactly as with the preceding sessions.”

  The prime minister looked around in search of support, without finding any sign of it. “Are you saying that there is other, classified information about Venice?”

  “Yes, Mr. Prime Minister.”

  “It’s against the law to classify information about massacres.”

  “Thanks very much for reminding us of the fact,” said Di Marco. “But I assure you that once we have completed this investigation, it’s going to be our solemn duty to inform the offices with proper jurisdiction of this classified information.”

  “But this is madness … You can’t do this.”

  “In the opinion of the previous administration and a number of illustrious constitutional scholars, we most certainly can. If you please, then, D’Amore. This time we’ll do our best to listen to what you have to say.”

  D’Amore cleared his throat. “As you know, Mr. Prime Minister, most of the victims in Venice belonged to a nonprofit organization called Care of the World, or COW to its friends.”

  “Spare me the ABC,” the prime minister replied in an icy tone. “The killers were four Daesh militants, trained in Syria and under the command of the so-called Leonardo Bonaccorso.”

  D’Amore didn’t bat an eye. “I’m afraid not. The information you’re talking about was fabricated.”

  The prime minister’s jaw dropped. “Wait. You’re saying that the details are fake?”

  “Yes.”

  “And just who fabricated the information?” He looked around again.

  Who do you think? Santini thought as he picked at his mustache.

  “The terror cell that carried out the attack did not form part of any known jihadi organizations,” D’Amore continued. “The Caliphate claimed credit for it as it so often does, trying to attribute to itself attacks performed by others. And for once, we let the claim go uncontested.”

  “All the intelligence agencies confirmed the reliability of the claim of responsibility. The members of the terror cell were already wanted by half the countries on the planet …” said the prime minister.

  The chief of police smacked his lips: he was starting to get sick of this. He was a powerfully built bald man in his early sixties, with fingers the size of sausages. There was no love lost between him and Santini, but they were forced to put up with each other. “I’m afraid not. They were respectively a child molester, a serial rapist who had partially cooked and eaten his roommate, an alcoholic ex-cop, and a guy who had drowned his wife in boiling water. And not one of them was a Muslim.”

  “What about Bonaccorso? Isn’t he a foreign fighter?”

  “For as little as we know about him, he might as well be the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio.”

  “A significant slice of foreign intelligence agencies took the information that we handed on to them as solid. Other agencies actually gave us a hand,” said Di Marco. “And as for Bonaccorso, he did not take part in the actual attack. He showed up at the scene afterward, in the company of Deputy Captain Caselli, and killed all the members of the terror cell he came into contact with, as well as COW’s founder, John Van Toder. It is our belief that he had nothing to do with them, and that he must have been working on behalf of some other organization, with objectives as yet to be determined. The investigation that we’re now in the middle of, and which demands absolute and all-encompassing discretion, is focused primarily on him.”

  “But the one who kidnapped Torre really was Bonaccorso, right?” the prime minister, ashen-faced, asked Colomba. “Or is that a concoction as well?”

  “Yes, it was him,” Colomba put in, speaking for the first time. “But not on behalf of the Islamic State, Mr. Prime Minister.”

  “Then for whom?”

  Colomba gritted her teeth. “I’d like to know that myself.”

  “Do the Americans know the truth?” whispered the prime minister. “Do the Americans know? Do the Russians?”

  The general of the Carabinieri lit a Toscano cigar in spite of an angry glare from Di Marco. “Mr. Prime Minister, let me give you a piece of advice: don’t talk about this with anyone. That’s what I do and it’s never a mistake.”

  The politician’s face reddened. “Four perverts can’t have orchestrated a bloodbath on this scale. Not alone, not without the support of some larger organization.”

  “You’re right about that, they did have some support. In fact, more than just support. They were recruited and organized by someone.” D’Amore reached into the file that lay on the table before him and pulled out a photograph of a corpse, which he slid over to the prime minister. It was a petite woman in an acid-green dress, covered with wounds and blood. Her face was frozen into a smile. “By her.”

  7

  That woman’s real identity was something that Santini had first learned the day he followed Di Marco into the Edmondo Matter barracks, immediately after the massacre. To his great astonishment, the colonel had led him through the kitchen, and then ushered him into a large walk-in freezer that was guarded by special forces officers. Surrounded by hanging sides of beef was a body bag, and in it was a woman in her early forties, with slightly Asian-looking eyes and a faint smile on her face.

  “She called herself Giltine,” Di Marco had told him. “As a girl she was a political prisoner in a Ukrainian prison better known as the Box. She was acting out of highly personal motives.”

  Santini had taken another look at the woman, shrunken and stiff in death. “So ISIS doesn’t have a fucking thing to do with all this. Caselli was right.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “And when do you intend to make this information public?”

  “Once it’s ceased to prove useful.”

  “Useful for who?”

  “For our country. Right now, it’s a secret known only to a very select few.”

  “Which includes
me.”

  Di Marco had stared him in the eyes and Santini had realized that his fate was being weighed at that very moment.

  “There’s a movie called Fight Club. Have you seen it?” Di Marco had asked him.

  “A long time ago.”

  “And do you remember the first rule of Fight Club?”

  “You do not talk about Fight Club. That’s the second rule, too.”

  Di Marco had nodded. “Welcome to our Fight Club, then.”

  8

  Santini lit a cigarette and refocused his attention on the conversation. The prime minister was speaking, and he looked like a punch-drunk boxer. “But why … what do we have to do with this Giltine?”

  “Nothing. She wanted to get the founder of COW,” said D’Amore, now showing a photograph of an old man with long white hair, his face frozen in a grimace of terror stamped by rigor mortis on his tanned face. “Whose name wasn’t John Van Toder at all, and who wasn’t South African, but Russian. His real name was Aleksander Belyy, and he was a criminal in the Cold War, let’s say the Soviet equivalent of Josef Mengele. He was in charge of political prisoners for the KGB. He arranged for hundreds of them to vanish into an insane asylum in the Ukraine known as the Box. Whole families, including the children. One of those children was the woman who carried out the massacre.”

  “My God,” said the prime minister. “And she killed forty-nine people just to get to him? People who had dedicated their lives to charity …”

  Santini heard the chief of police choke back a laugh.

  “Even COW wasn’t what it claimed to be,” said D’Amore, with something verging on regret. “It was merely a cover organization for a network of private military contractors established by Belyy in his second life. COW laundered cash and used humanitarian missions as a cover to transfer weapons and men into areas that were under embargo.”

  “But why didn’t you say anything about this? You needed to report the acts of this criminal!”